Mad Dogs and Englishmen

There is so much happening that I have found it difficult finding time to keep up with my blog. So we'll start with Labor Day when met up with our 24-year old son and his girlfriend in Sturgeon Bay WI. I hadn't seen him since March so it was good to see him again. He gave us a book called "A Place of My Own" by Michael Pollan. It's basically the story of how Pollan designs and builds a one-room cabin behind his house in northern Connecticut. Sounds simple? Not the way he does it. Pollan approaches this seemingly simple task with the same thoroughness and attention to detail as one would building something 100 times the size. I haven't finished the book yet but found a resonance in his struggles with getting the building in the exact right spot. He samples Feng Shui, studies the great architects of the past and present, consults with his own architect and of course wisely gets his wife's counsel. Inspired, I went back to our site plan.

One of the guiding ideas suggested by Pollan's architect is to think of where you might pitch a tent. You need protection from the elements and thus surround yourself by terrain if possible. You don't want to be under any trees, but trees offer shade and a barrier to wind, so a closeness is desirable. Everywhere we've experimented with so far -- and we have tried five different locations -- just didn't seem right. So we tried to think of where we would pitch a tent, bearing in mind that we had to be away from the oak tree roots, one foot for every one inch of trunk diameter. We eventually decided to place the workshop closer to the house and in the middle of the existing driveway (which is in fact more like a rutted cart path than an actual drive), creating a tight group of buildings with a sort of courtyard at the center. (Note that it's no longer a "barn", having given up on the idea of re-creating the old barn and succumbing to my partner's desire to keep the existing structure intact. Well a fella can change his mind can't he?) Removing many of the fences helped our decision as now, instead of several separate pastures, we have one contiguous piece of land without barriers. So here is an image from Google Earth showing our site plan with the new driveway looping through a covered drive-through in the workshop building and into the "courtyard".  

Pulling fence posts was hard, hot and sweaty work in the Texas summer sun. But it has made a huge difference. Despite protesting that she would never drive the tractor, I couldn't get my partner off the thing once she got the hang of rolling posts out of the ground, leaving me to cut wire and drag them out. You know, the real cowboy stuff. Our neighbor commented on the fact that not many locals are out there working past midday, which brought to mind that lovely song by Noel Coward, the chorus of which goes:             
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
The Japanese don't care to, the Chinese wouldn't dare to,
Hindus and Argentines sleep firmly from twelve to one,
But Englishmen detest a siesta,
In the Philippines there are lovely screens, to protect you from the glare,
In the Malay states there are hats like plates, which the Britishers won't wear,
At twelve noon the natives swoon, and no further work is done -
But Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

But the cooler weather this past week has been a joy to behold. We set-up a picnic table and chairs under the trees and had several dinners and lunches outside, our $24 Walmart table, adorned with a single rose, placed there by my partner, matching anything from the spiffiest of restaurants.